That is the coldest take I’ve ever heard.

According to the Article:

Google in Russia has been inactive since 2022 after the search giant effectively pulled out of the country following Putin’s special military operation.

They didn’t start with that fine, it was just compounding interest

The court imposed a fine of 100 thousand rubles ($1,025) per day, with the total fine doubling every week.

And regardless, Russia can’t block Google’s operations in Russia because Google isn’t operating in Russia since the war. Russia is trying to fire Google when Google quit 2 years ago.

The most popular games will likely continue to get pirated, all this will do is guarantee that some small vintage games are lost to time.

Even worse. I’ve checked out digital eBooks and digital audiobooks from my local library. And I listened to those audiobooks for FUN. The AUDACITY!

Audacity is what I used to record those audiobooks so I could listen at my own pace, btw.

May I could check out a paper copy of those bits, would that be okay? Then it’s not a digital copy

I answered your question on another thread of the same topic, but I’ll answer it here too for anyone else who has the same question: The law is just about digital backups. Vintage stores are still legal, and if anything this would boost sales at a vintage stores. If the game you’d like to play is unavailable at a vintage store or on eBay (or wherever else) then it will be entirely inaccessible for you to play legally.

As someone who may or may not have stripped DRM from library books, they certainly never seemed to care about that. And it was never even to share, but rather to store for myself so I could read it at my own pace. And the worst part… I read it for RECREATIONAL USE

You’d better not also be reading books for fun. By their logic, any recreational use of books from a library should also be considered illegal.

They’re saying the only way you can get the games legally is by buying them. But since the products aren’t made anymore, if it’s unavailable for purchase, it will be impossible for you to play (legally).

They were essentially trying to preserve vintage games with a library style check-out system of digital copies of the games you can play with an emulator. The ruling concluded that was not legal, since the preserved games were used for recreational use. As it stands, if the last physical copy of a game is lost, the only one that would legally have the game files would hypothetically be the original publisher (assuming they kept the original files) and it would be entirely up to the publisher how they shared it. If they decided to keep it to themselves, it would be lost to the public (by any legal means, at least).

Their argument doesn’t really make sense to me, though. I guess we should also ban any books that are used for recreational purposes. If a book is not a non-fiction textbook, someone might read it for fun, which is unacceptable. I think we should get rid of 1984 from all the libraries, since people might read it for enjoyment.